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The Importance of Brown v. Board

Roger Wilkins

Professor Patterson's book is a wonderful piece of research, terrific writing, and very provocative. But anybody who doesn't think that Brown v. Board lmade a difference isn't following Big Ten football. When I went to the University of Michigan in the mid-1950s, the Big Ten was the best football conference in the nation. The southern schools had all white boys; no black athletes. But in 2001 the Big Ten was whipped about four to nothing in Bowl games by the Southeast conference. In football, speed kills, and Florida has got speed and the rest of those southern schools have got speed. And when I look at basketball games and I see the University of Alabama sending five black starters onto the floor and remember the struggles to integrate it back in the 1960s, I'm looking at a different country.

I was an intern for Thurgood Marshall in the summer of 1955, working on some of the mop-up work after Brown v. Board. I believe deeply in integration. I've also been a member of the Washington, D. C. school board for a year and I haven't used the word "desegregation" once in all of my work on it. Those statements may sound like contradictions but perhaps I can explain them.

I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, seventy years ago, so I remember segregation. I was born in a segregated hospital. My first educational experience was in a one-room segregated schoolhouse. When it closed I, a five year old, was bused way across town to a segregated elementary school. My father died when I was eight and we moved to New York, where I was taught by white teachers in a de facto segregated school in Harlem.

Then my mother remarried and in the early 1940s we moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where all of a sudden I found myself the only black kid in a virtually all white school. Boy, was that painful. But it was useful, because it taught me something that I could never have learned in a segregated school. You really have to feel it to understand the grinding weight on a kid's soul of segregation, of a society that tells you in every way it can

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Roger Wilkins is a Clarence J. Robinson Profess or History and American Culture, George Mason University; formerly Assistant Attorney General of the United States, office of the Ford Foundation, editorial writer for the Washington Post and the New York Times, commentator for CBS News and for the Mutual Broadcasting System; co-recipient (with Woodward, Bernstein, and Herblock) of a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Watergate; former leader, Free South Africa Movement; author, Jefferson`s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism (Beacon Press, 2001); A Man`s Life (Simon & Schuster, 1982); co-editor, Quiet Riots: Race and Poverty in the United States (Pantheon, 1988); and member, District of Columbia Board of Education.

14 African-American Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center